Rodney Anderson blamed a botched fax for a chain of errors that ultimately led the state Republican Party to retract attack ads and apologize to his Democratic opponent for House District 105.
And in his first public comments since the unraveling of his accusations that Democrat Susan Motley was breaking the law by campaigning, Anderson announced that he would not press them further.
“I have made the decision to end this here,” Anderson said in an email to voters on Wednesday.
Another mass email from Anderson’s campaign, about two weeks ago, announced that Motley “appears to be in direct violation of the Hatch Act” — a law that bars federal employees from politics.
Anderson’s campaign gave news media a complaint it said it had filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, arguing that the law restricted Motley because she worked for a nonprofit that took federal funds.
It gave the same letter to the Republican Party of Texas, which sent Anderson’s charges out on mailers to tens of thousands of voters. A few days later, the agency said it knew of no complaint against Motley.
Anderson’s campaign initially said that was due to a possible “clerical error” at the Office of Special Counsel. Now, it says a campaign staffer failed to properly fax the letter.
“At the time we sent the email, our belief was that the complaint had been filed,” Anderson wrote. “That was incorrect and we regret that error.”
The Office of Special Counsel finally received Anderson’s complaint early last week. The agency ruled a few days later that Motley was not bound by the Hatch Act and was free to run.
“Instead of pushing this issue to the next level of appeal and perhaps litigation, we will return the focus of this campaign to the issues facing this state and the people of House District 105,” Anderson wrote.
His announcement came after the state Republican Party mailed apologies to Motley and tens of thousands of potential voters for running attack ads against Motley based on Anderson’s “purported complaint.”
Anderson’s campaign did not respond to questions about why it failed to confirm that the Office of Special Counsel had received its complaint before sending it to the party and promoting it to voters.
James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, said District 105 was “becoming one of the storied districts of the House.”
“What a mess,” he said. “At the very least, it’s highly unusual to use the statewide budget in the last week of a campaign to mail an apology. I have not seen it before — certainly not in the last decade or so.”
While the district leans Republican, Henson said, some close races with Democrats in recent elections put this year’s race on political observers’ watch lists — even before Anderson’s accusations and the GOP’s apology for them.
